


If You Can't Stand the Heat, Don't Put Chilli Oil on Your Chicken

by notaverse



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Cooking, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-02
Updated: 2011-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-24 06:11:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt from Tia: <i>Kame, Jin, candy canes, snow, & cooking Christmas dinner!</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Can't Stand the Heat, Don't Put Chilli Oil on Your Chicken

Jin's new apartment didn't have much going for it other than that the fans hadn't found it yet, which was why he had no intention of spending Christmas there. Kame's place was much warmer. For once, neither of them was working on Christmas Day and, armed with a box of candy canes sent from a friend in the States and a couple of bags of groceries, Jin planned to make the most of it.

He just forgot to tell Kame.

"You can't turn up on my doorstep with a turkey and a bag of vegetables and expect me to make a meal out of it!"

Jin deposited the ingredients on Kame's kitchen counter. "I did ask you if you were free today?" he offered.

"And I said I was. I didn't say that meant I had the time to be your kitchen slave." Kame cast a dubious eye over the turkey. "Isn't that a little on the small side?"

"It's a chicken," Jin mumbled. "I couldn't get a turkey on short notice. As it was, I had to fight a couple of old ladies for this one."

"Akanishi Jin: Scourge of the Supermarket." Kame examined the bags of vegetables and box of gravy mix. It appeared Jin wanted a completely Western Christmas - at least in terms of food. "That still doesn't tell me what you're doing here."

"I haven't unpacked anything from my kitchen yet except some glasses and my microwave, which won't get me very far cooking anything, and I wanted a Christmas dinner at home."

"You're not at home!"

"Close enough. Anyway, you're a better cook than I am."

"Granted, but-"

"I really liked it when I had it in America," Jin said quietly.

Kame sighed and resigned himself to spending the day in the kitchen. "Fine, but you're helping."

"Okay!" Jin beamed at him and retrieved the bag he'd left by the front door. "I've already taken care of dessert." He removed a large white box and stashed it in Kame's fridge, squashing everything else into the corners to make room. "Where do we start?"

It was obviously going to be a very long day. "With alcohol," Kame decided, going for an unopened bottle of red wine. "You'd better open the fridge again - the beer's right at the back."

Thus liquored up, they set to work. It was a miracle neither of them lost a finger. They had a good system going - while Kame prepped the chicken, mostly by throwing random spices over it until it looked interesting enough to satisfy him, Jin busied himself peeling vegetables. Not chopping them, because that was Kame's arena, but he had fun trying to peel potatoes so the skin came off in a spiral. So much fun, in fact, that he ended up peeling more than he'd meant to.

"We're not trying to feed a family of six," Kame said when he saw the pile of freshly peeled and scrubbed potatoes. "How about moving on to other vegetables now?"

While Kame started chopping and parboiling things, Jin had a moment of panic trying to fit the chicken in the oven till he realised the lower shelf could be removed. The roasting pan took up a lot of space, but it was big enough that they could throw most things in with the chicken and cook them in the bird's juices. "Next year we're doing fried chicken," he said.

"Next year you can pay someone else to do your Christmas dinner," Kame grumbled good-naturedly.

"Don't pretend you're not getting something out of this. I paid for the ingredients, and dessert, and I'm helping too. Plus, you get the pleasure of my company." Kame raised his eyebrows; Jin smirked and fished out the box of candy canes. "And I brought these!"

Kame looked pointedly at the box, which had been placed perilously close to his chopping board. "I'm up to my elbows in sliced carrots and you want me to eat sweets?"

"Well, maybe not right now..." Jin moved the box to a safer location and took one out for himself. "But since you're using the chopping board and I can't do anything until the chicken's been in a little longer, I'm going to have one, okay?"

"Just keep it away from the food."

Easy enough. Jin leaned against the door, enjoying the mix of cooking smells rising from various pots and pans - not to mention the sight of Kame in a pale blue apron, hair tied back in a messy ponytail and eyes burning with such intensity you'd have thought he was performing surgery, not chopping sweet potatoes. It was going to be wonderful, Jin knew. Not perfect, because KAT-TUN in general weren't great with perfection, but wonderful.

He removed the cellophane from the candy cane and twirled it under his nose. Mmm, cinnamon. According to the label, the box contained a mix of flavours, including strawberry; Jin intended to save that one for Kame. He gave it a tentative lick, sampling the sweet red-and-white goodness. Dinner was a long way off, he wouldn't spoil his appetite if he had a little snack. He ran the stick along his lips, reaching the end with an audible smack, and realised Kame had stopped chopping vegetables to watch him.

"Hungry?" he teased.

Kame gave him a challenging look. "How does it taste?"

"Want to find out for yourself?"

"Come here."

But Kame didn't go for the candy cane, as Jin had expected - he went for Jin's lips instead, licking at the cinnamon sweetness before stealing a kiss that left them both grinning like Cheshire cats and wishing they weren't in the middle of cooking. Jin broke off a piece of the curved end - the part that hadn't been in his mouth - and gave it to Kame to suck on while he finished with the knife. He wouldn't accept the rest, no matter how much attention Jin paid to it with his tongue, though he did warn him once that it wasn't wise to distract a man holding a blade in his hands.

Jin had to turn the chicken over and poke it several times with a fork after it had been in half an hour; Kame carefully arranged vegetable mountains beside it. The whole lot went back in the oven for a good roasting. Kame finished up the remaining trimmings while Jin started washing up some of the mess and packing things away.

He didn't expect to find a jar of chilli oil in the mix. "I didn't bring this. Did you put it on the chicken?"

"I bought some in case you turned up out of the blue, demanding weird snack food in the middle of the night." Jin couldn't argue with Kame's explanation, not when he'd done it several times before - while slightly intoxicated, admittedly. "And yeah, I threw a bit of everything on the chicken. Should be interesting."

Jin noted the red pepper flakes and other assorted jars lined up along the edge of the table. This chicken was going to be _hot_. "It'll be the manliest Christmas dinner ever."

"I hope your dessert will cool us down. What is it, anyway?"

"A surprise. You don't get to see until we're ready for it."

With so much food to eat, it didn't seem likely they'd be ready for it until the New Year, but both of them took great pleasure in food and it felt extremely satisfying, eating something they'd worked on together - even if the chicken burned their mouths a bit, and the carrots were weird shapes where Jin had peeled at angles. They snacked on leftover chicken while watching 'Pirates of the Caribbean', which was hardly a Christmas movie but had Johnny Depp so it was one both of them could agree on.

By the time the end credits rolled it was definitely time for dessert. Jin insisted on preparing it himself; Kame was left to watch the news ("Arashi to be first idol group to perform on the moon") while Jin removed it from the box, arranged it neatly on a plate, and brought it through to set down on the coffee table.

"You didn't bake that, did you?" Kame asked.

"Not even if I trained for a thousand years. You like it?"

"I love it."

Dessert was a delicate sponge cake, iced in white and topped with miniature marzipan fir trees arranged in a ring. In the centre of the clearing stood Santa in his sleigh, with a single reindeer to pull it and a pile of presents in the back. It looked too perfect to spoil by cutting.

"There's more." Jin pulled out a small packet of white chocolate flakes, tore off one corner and handed the rest to Kame. "Sprinkle some snow."

Kame scattered most of them across the cake's surface before Jin stuck out his tongue and demanded his own personal snowflakes. "You're still a little kid at heart."

"A little kid who's just had everything he wants for Christmas," Jin pointed out. "How about you?"

"Oh, there's one more thing I want but haven't had yet..." Kame flashed him a wink. "At least, haven't had _today_."

Jin nudged the coffee table carefully out of harm's way - the cake, work of art that it was, could wait for later. "I'm sure I could do something about that..."


End file.
